Death of Printed Books May Have Been Exaggerated

New submitter razor88x writes "Although just 16% of Americans have purchased an e-book to date, the growth rate in sales of digital books is already dropping sharply. At the same time, sales of dedicated e-readers actually shrank in 2012, as people bought tablets instead. Meanwhile, printed books continue to be preferred over e-books by a wide majority of U.S. book readers. In his blog post Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?, writer Nicholas Carr draws on these statistics and others to argue that, contrary to predictions, printed books may continue to be the book's dominant form. 'We may be discovering,' he writes, 'that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute.'"

Comments

Re:An e-book is not a book.

[Osgeld]

you can still not care about resolution or color depth ... books havent in generations, why should you?

why would I spend 2 bucks on a newspaper bias to an opinion? and e-ink works fine in sunlight

read it when I was a kid, done, not a romantic hoarder

if you want to see discardablecontent at its worst, go to a thrift store or used book store, and look at the sheer infestation of books no one wants to look at, they cant even give them away.

depends on which printed version you looked at, the one I last saw looked like a bad photocopy